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Loading ...Willfully influencing a system may result in blowback out of proportion to its intended benefits.
I read NonZero years ago and think that since there has been such an increase in complexity in non zero sum games* with the advent of the Internet and globalism, we have to look at how things work, what things work, and how things can be repaired in entirely new and innovative ways, basing our decision less on the individual “ants” in a colony and more on how the emergence of all those “ants” doing their own little ant-brained thing results in a “colony.”
Many believe that the colony is one organism and the ant is another. Each has a different life span, life experience, and temperament. What repairs the ant does not necessarily repair the colony. In terms of non zero sum game, what is the responsibility of a participant of this social network (or hive, or colony) towards the success and health of whole? One might say that to an ant, this is meaningless. Just by being the best, happiest, disciplined and most successful ant, the emergence results in a healthy colony. That the ant is not controlled by the queen, and the colony is simply the pattern resulting from the cascade of many small actions into a large movement.
No vanguard of the proletariat, no monarchy, no top-down; simply, individual choices bubbling up into something that when far away is recognizable as something intentional.
Some would say that humans are similar as each of our cells only addresses a specialized function, but the emergence of all these little processes bubbles up into you and me. And we bubble up to our villages, into out cities, into out nation states, into our human race.
There is of course an important ethical concern when it comes to understanding effective ways to influence this emergent system. Influence meaning steer, change, adapt, conform, harm, or repair the system outside of just participating in the system at the ant level. In the case of repairing what we might perceive as an unhealthy system, society, or colony, what repairs the colony might kill many ants. And there’s the rub:
Morally and ethically, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, but what’s good for the gander ain’t always good for the goose.
* What is a non zero sum game? Well, basically, a zero sum game is a game wherein the out come is winner takes all. A non zero sum game understands that in more complex systems such as colonies or communities, there needs to be a system where — to put it simply and naively — eveyone wins. Also known as collaboration or cooperation. According to Robert Wright, the author of NonZero, “The underlying reason that non-zero-sum games wind up being played well is the same in biological evolution as in cultural evolution. Whether you are a bunch of genes or a bunch of memes, if you’re all in the same boat you’ll tend to perish unless you are conducive to productive coordination…. Genetic evolution thus tends to create smoothly integrated organisms, and cultural evolution tends to create smoothly integrated groups of organisms.”
Filed under: Game Theory
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